After learning about Because-X, I was on the hunt to find more syntactic innovations that were unique to the internet. Specifically, I was looking for innovations in other languages. And I was able to find two articles for this week – one focusing on a Japanese structure, and one focusing on some innovations in Spanish.
Kudasai & Making Requests
Kudasai is a Japanese politeness marker. We can consider it to be equivalent to English ‘please’. In standard Japanese it can follow verbs ending in -te (63). But people started to notice it being used in a new way online. In this nonstandard usage kudasai was following an imperative verb (A verb form used to command or to order, like “Sit!” or “Pass me the salt” in English). As in English, imperative verbs are used in specific situations, and are rude to use outside of those situations. A parent can tell a child “sit down!” but it’s not socially acceptable for a child to tell an adult “sit down”. So we have a very interesting context here of combining an imperative verb with ‘please’.
This specific structure (called X-siro+kudasai, siro being the ending of an imperative verb) was being used to express indirect requests on various online forums (65). These requests could involve asking for someone to correct answers or give advice on buying a computer. A few examples were not indirect requests, but simply expressed the emotion of the speaker, such as the message “Please release a new game software rather than making the game into an anime” (66). Obviously, none of the forum users (as far as the poster was aware) were involved in developing video games, so this is more of a rhetorical request.
But why was this structure being used? After all, there are already two ways to express requests in standard Japanese (67). Naya suggests that these polite forms of making a request would be too formal for conversations on these online forums. There is a sense of camaraderie between the users, and using this formal form would feel out of place, and orient the speaker as more of an outsider (69). At the same time, the relationship between the speaker and the readers is ambiguous. The speaker doesn’t know which readers can fulfill their request, and going by general rules of conversation we should only make requests if we expect that the addressee can fulfill them (70). So using only the imperative form would feel rude, since it’s both flouting this social rule and it is placing the speaker in a position of authority where they are allowed to use such forms. X-siro+kudasai seems to be a compromise between the informality of the situation and the desire to still maintain some politeness (69).
Within the x-siro+kudasai structure, Naya argues the imperative functions as a private expression which “expresses the mental state of the writer”, while the addition of kudasai makes the expression public (73). This aligns with the discussion from Supplemental: Because-X, where we explained that in Japanese expressions are private by default and require some sort of marking to become public expressions. However, kudasai is working slightly differently in this setting than addressee-oriented expressions normally do (73). Rather than marking the message as being intended for an audience which can fulfill the request, kudasai is marking that the message is being oriented toward readers (73). The sentence as a whole is meant to serve as an expression of desire, with the request being an implied secondary meaning (73-75). This lines up with how the imperative functions in other private expressions in Japanese – as a desire or a wish, rather than a command (74). Thus, it seems like the x-siro+kudasai structure is indeed another example of a private expression within a larger public expression.
Spanish Innovations
The piece by De Benito Moreno covered three different types of new morphosyntactic (word construction and sentence construction) innovations within Spanish-speaking online context.
The first is the extension of suffixes, specifically -í. In Standard Spanish, -í is a diminutive and affectionate prefix that can be added to proper names, common nouns, and adjectives (15). Examples include Marí (from María), papí (from papa, father) and rubí (from rubio, blond)(15). But some Twitter users are extending the -í suffix to other types of words, like greetings (‘holí’ from ‘hola’, hello) and verbs (‘te quieri muchi’, rather than the standard ‘te quiero mucho’, I love you) (17, 19). In standard usage, the -í suffix is used to connote a sense of affection for the referent (‘Marí’shows affection for María and so on) but ‘quieri’ isn’t showing affection toward the actual action of loving. Rather, it is giving the entire message an affectionate tone or showing affection for the object of that verb, ‘te’ (you) (19).
The second innovation is the re-categorization of fuerte, ‘strong’, as an adverb. In standard Spanish fuerte can only be used with a few categories of verbs, those being verbs describing speech and verbs describing movement/contact (“hablar fuerte”, speak loudly; “apretar fuerte”, press hard)(20). Twitter users are now extending fuerte to verbs of all types, including those describing abstract concepts like pensar, to think, and saber, to know (20-21).
The third innovation, which is perhaps the most interesting, regards how users have been using ojalá. Ojalá is a fixed Spanish expression, roughly meaning ‘I wish’ or ‘I hope’. It does not conjugate for person or tense, and can be used on its own or it can take a subordinate clause with a subjunctive verb (21-22). For example, you could say “Ojalá que lo del Madrid sea un mal sueño”, or ‘I hope that what’s happened with Real Madrid was a bad dream” (22). But you could not say ‘Ojalá un libro nuevo’, or ‘I wish a new book’. Well, at least you could not say that previously. Twitter users have been using ojalá in more innovative ways (22-23). Take the examples “Ojalá unas terceras elecciones”, ‘I wish [for] third eleccions’, or “Ojalá estar viajando constantemente”, ‘I wish I were constantly traveling’ (23). In this way, ojalá is acting similar to because-x in that we have a structure which is now being used to connect clauses in a non-standard way.
What I find especially interesting is how we can also explain some ojalá structures and their meanings by viewing them as public or private utterances. In some of these innovative ojalá uses, a subject can be omitted, as in the tweet “Ojalá encerrada con Aston Kutcher en un ascensor”, “I wish [I were] locked with Ashton Kutcher in an elevator” (27). Despite there being no verbs or other markers in the sentence indicating a first person reading, Twitter users interpret this message as expressing the desires of the speaker despite the subject not being explicitly noted (28). This is very similar to the argument that because-x functions as a private utterance expressing the perspective of the speaker. However, unlike because-x or kudasai, ojalá does not seem to be creating a private expression within a larger public expression here. I am also unsure whether the use of ojalá here is marking the message as a private expression, or whether the private nature of these tweets with dropped subjects is simply coincidental.
De Benito Moreno suggests that users continue to use these innovations because they create a feeling of familiarity between users (32). Affectionate suffixes aren’t often used in formal writing, after all. And if we do think that ojalá involves a private expression, similar to that of because-x, we can also say that ojalá serves a similar function of creating a sense of intimacy between participants, because the reader must adopt the speaker’s perspective in order to understand the meaning of the sentence. But this may not be true of all cases of ojalá, so future analysis may be needed.
However, the argument that these innovations serve to create familiarity does not fully explain the extended usage of fuerte, which to my knowledge does not have any specific connotations indicating informality or friendliness. We could perhaps argue that abstract verbs can be emphasized in face to face conversations with tone, body language, and so on that aren’t available in digital dialogues. So the extension of fuerte to abstract verbs was a way to extend an already present strategy of emphasis. But this still doesn’t clearly link it to creation of familiarity. Again, future analysis is needed to determine whether fuerte is part of strategies of creating intimacy online, or if it is serving some other function.
Conclusion
If these two pieces are any proof, we can see that new syntactic structures are arising in online contexts. Between kudasai, ojalá, and because-x, we can also see that these structures cover a variety of meanings and purposes, from connecting cause and effect to making requests to expressing wishes. But what all three have in common is that they are being used in interpersonal communication and they play with the intimacy being created or violated between the author and their audience. This further supports Kanetani’s suggestion that because-x and similar structures are arising due to a particular need to bridge the geographic and emotional distance involved with digital communication.
References
De Benito Moreno, Carlota. “‘The Spanish of the Internet’: Is That a Thing?: Discursive and Morphosyntactic Innovations in Computer Mediated Communication.” English and Spanish: World Languages in Interaction, edited by Danae Perez et al., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2021, pp. 258–286.
Naya, Ryohei. “An Innovative Use of Kudasai in Social Networking Services.”Annals of “Dimitrie Cantemir” Christian University: Linguistics,Literature and Methodology of Teaching, vol. 17, no. 1, 2017, pp. 62–78.